Introduction
Are you a small business owner who is feeling lost on the internet? You got a great product or service, but people or customers aren’t coming into your shop. You see these big companies or media sites dominating the online space and local space. And you’re wondering, how can I compete with them without breaking my bank account or spending huge amount of money?
If you’re slowly nodding yes to these questions, then this video and video series is for you because what I’m going to teach you in this is digital marketing for small business owners.
I’m going to teach you exactly all the ways which you can do digital marketing for your business at the level you are comfortable with. It is not going to be perfect or very advanced or over complicated. I’m going to break down this into a very simple, easy to follow, beginner friendly and non-technical way.
Even my mother can do it. Actually, she’s actually doing it herself. She runs a tailoring education business. She has a website, YouTube channel, social media pages, and she accomplished all these things which I taught her. She has over 5,000 plus subscribers on her channel, a group with over 20,000 members, and a website which brings around 5,000 visitors a day.
I’m going to teach you the same things which you can apply for your business and see the results you want. So if you are ready to put in the work, I’m going to teach you the best way to do digital marketing for your business.
About the Instructor
Before I go into the guide, just a brief intro about me, because you might be wondering how I’m qualified to teach you this. I am Alston Antony and I run two digital marketing agencies. I have 12+ years of experience in this field. I have also taught more than 30,000 students worldwide.
But I’m not going to focus this guide on me. I’m going to focus entirely on you and your business.
Why Digital Marketing Is Crucial for Small Businesses
Let me take a few minutes to explain why digital marketing matters for small businesses. You know the importance of digital marketing – that’s why you clicked on this video and you’re watching to this point. But sometimes you might have missed some of the major benefits of digital marketing for small business.
Knowing these benefits will extra motivate you to keep focused on learning digital marketing for small businesses and applying it to your business.
Key Benefits of Digital Marketing for Small Business
1. 24/7 Salesperson for Your Business
Imagine this: you are running a shop, you are not going to keep opening that shop 24 by 7 because you need employees for that, you need to be running all the expenses and everything. From time to time, you might close down the shop or you might have a schedule for your shop.
But when you’re doing digital marketing for your business using the Internet to promote your business, basically it is going to be working 24 by 7. There is no stopping in it. It is going to be available all the time. Customers can learn about your business all the time. They can even buy from you all the time. And when you are available, you can help them.
So that is the beauty of digital marketing for small business. It is going to be operating for you 24 by 7.
2. Cost-Effective Digital Marketing Solutions
The next important benefit is that it’s cost-effective. Digital marketing for small business can be expensive and also can be affordable. It is going to be based on what strategies we are going to use. Traditional advertising doesn’t work like that. Most of the time, traditional advertising which brings you mass audience is going to cost you a lot.
For example, radio ads, TV ads, or even newspaper ads are going to cost you. But with affordable digital marketing for small businesses, it’s all up to you. You can spend just $5 or $10, $500 or $5,000. It’s all up to you. The result and effort is going to vary depending on the budget.
So whatever the cost or the digital marketing budget for small businesses you are comfortable with, you can use that for your digital marketing.
3. Measurable Results
The next benefit is going to be measurable results. This is a key factor when you are doing digital marketing. When you’re using local marketing methods or strategies, most of the time you might not be able to see accurately how many people were impacted by that ad, how many people got interested, how many people actually came only from that particular ad and purchased your product.
It is very hard to measure it, but with digital marketing for small businesses, every sale, every visitor, every interaction, every conversation, everything is measurable and trackable. So you exactly know what marketing strategy or what method you used brought these customers to your business.
4. Levels the Playing Field
The next benefit is that it levels the playing field for you. It does not matter how big your competitor is, it does not matter how big the companies you’re competing with are. Even in a local offline mode, you might have struggles competing with them. They might have huge banner boards, they might have huge marketing channels, they might go after your customers very aggressively where you are not able to compete with them.
But with digital marketing strategies for small business, you have a secret set of resources with you, where if you use your knowledge and intelligently market, even you can compete with these big companies, and you can have a very unique way of attracting customers to you.
So it does not matter how big your competitor is – with digital marketing for small business and with some creativity on your end, you can still play and compete with them on the same level without spending that much.
Best Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Business
Now let’s quickly see what are the methods available for you in digital marketing strategies for small business, which you can apply for your own business:
1. Website – The Foundation of Digital Marketing
Website is very, very, very important. It is almost like the basic component of digital marketing for small business. A website is going to be like an online shop for your local business or small business, where any people who are interested can come into your website, learn about your business, and they will hopefully turn into a customer for you.
That is the purpose of your website – it’s going to be an e-shop for your business. Basically, on your website, you put all the information about your business, products you’re selling, services you’re selling, customer experiences, about us pages, gallery, all these things. So basically a website is a shop for you which exists on the Internet and is running 24 by 7.
So website building and website optimization for your local business is going to be a key digital marketing strategy for small business.
2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, this is what helps you to bring your website to the top results of search engines such as Google, Bing, and other popular search engines.
So whenever a customer is going into one of the search engines and types something relevant to your business, something they search for, with SEO – by doing SEO for your website and your business – we want to make sure that the customer sees our website or the customer sees our local business listing and comes into our website to learn more about our business and tries to make a purchase or hire us for a particular service.
So that is what SEO for small business does for us.
3. Content Marketing
Content marketing is a strategy we use to create relevant content which attracts your target audience. It is not always going after main keywords or it’s not always going after the big ones. We actually want to create content in terms of text-based media, images, video – any content which attracts our target audience.
So by that, we are organically engaging with our customers which will bring them to our business, which can lead them to become our customers as well.
4. Social Media Marketing for Small Business
This is a very important one. Social media marketing for small business involves platforms like you already know – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok – there are so many social media platforms. Basically, these platforms are where, ideally, our customers are going to be hanging out. They are going to be using these social media platforms for their personal benefits, interacting with their friends using social media.
So we want to have our business on these platforms where our customers are also present. So that is where social media marketing for small business comes into play, where we will be using these social media platforms to market our small business to them.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing is where we will collect relevant or our target audience’s emails through customer outreach or by using lead magnets and newsletter subscriptions. And once customers are interested in learning more about our products or services or in our niche, we will provide helpful information. We will teach customers. We will provide tips.
By doing that, we will also silently be promoting our products or services to customers. So even a customer who purchased from you one time, they can become recurring or repeat customers to your business. Or a customer who is not interested in your product at the first time, after several helpful emails and guides, they might come back to you and purchase from you as well.
6. Paid Advertising (PPC) for Small Business
Then we have ads, also known as PPC (pay-per-click) advertising campaigns. We can run ads on almost all the platforms on the Internet. Search engines – we can run ads. Social media – we can run ads. Any places you consider, we can run ads.
Running ads is not simple at all, because if you don’t know how to manage or how to properly target your ads, you might run out of your budget very fast. You might be spending money on an irrelevant customer base or untargeted customer audience.
But learning how to run ads perfectly without worrying about going unreasonably over budget helps you to focus your ad campaigns at a targeted level and get the results you want. It’s not about reaching how many people, but it’s about reaching your target audience.
Evolving Digital Marketing Strategies
These are some of the main digital marketing strategies for small business. But just remember, digital marketing strategies are constantly evolving. So this is not fixed anymore. I have just explained some of the main ones, but so many digital marketing strategies for small business are coming into play, and with the development of AI also, this is getting much more interesting right now.
So make sure that these are just the basic ones, and by creating more videos in the future, I’ll explain some of the new digital marketing strategies for small business which might be interesting to you, which might give you more results even compared to these traditional digital marketing strategies.
Setting Up a Solid Digital Marketing Foundation
This is going to be a video series. I told you at the initial stage because I don’t want to give you all the information in one video. It is going to be confusing for you. So what I have decided is I’m going to create single videos focusing on each single objective, which you can use to understand quickly the concept and apply this digital marketing for small business.
So I’m going to give you a solid digital foundation. I’m going to give you an idea on how you can create the best content, which is going to be helpful for your content marketing. I’m going to show you how to do search engine optimization for your website and for your local business listing. I’m going to show you tips and strategies which you can use for your social media marketing channels.
And finally, I will also show you how you can run ads and email marketing and a lot more digital marketing strategies for small business.
All this isn’t just going to be theory. I’m going to show you step by step, practical knowledge, practical videos. I will give you checklists. I’m going to give you worksheets. I’m going to give you tutorial guides which you can follow to straight away start applying it.
Why Digital Marketing Foundation Matters
Let me give you an example. A few years ago, I got a local mattress shop client for my digital marketing agency. When I talked with them, they simply said that digital marketing did not work for them. They did not understand what is important, how they can get conversions, how to track it, how their success is measured. They had a ton of problems.
I asked them, “What did you do?” The client did not know anything about digital marketing. They hired a digital marketing agency, and without any proper planning or setting up a foundation for their digital marketing campaign, what they did was they started doing Facebook ads only.
Remember, they did not plan anything. They did not have a website, they did not have business information, they did not have targets. They just put money into their Facebook account – around $3,000 US dollars. And after three or four months, the results were good, but it was not giving them the best ROI on their investment.
The main reason for this is they did not set up a digital foundation correctly. They did not know where they were, how they should go, and what should be the future and how to properly measure and track it.
Benefits of a Strong Digital Marketing Foundation
- Consistency Across All Channels: It gives your business consistency across all the channels and platforms in digital marketing or in online space. It builds brand reputation for your business.
- Better Understanding of Target Audience: It helps you to understand your target audience better. When you have a solid foundation on what your business is about and who are your target customers, you can use that information to run a targeted digital marketing campaign.
- Improved Decision Making: It helps you in your decision making ability. In digital marketing, everything is based on decisions – how you should decide which is the correct strategy, how much should you spend, what time you should invest, what resources you should create.
- Cost Effectiveness: Having a solid foundation will help you reduce your overall costs when you are running campaigns, when you are doing SEO, when you are creating websites.
Creating a Buyer Persona for Your Small Business
There is a good saying which I really like: “If you are trying to sell to everyone, you will end up selling to no one.” This is very true in digital marketing for small business.
Digital marketing’s core lies within understanding who is your target audience, what they want, where they are staying in the online space, and how you can sell to them. This is why we create something called a buyer persona.
In simple terms, a buyer persona is a simple way to understand who your ideal customers are. Think of it like a detailed description of a fictional customer who represents your target audience. This fictional person will help you to understand all their needs, so you can tailor your products or services according to them.
For a detailed guide and free template, check out our Buyer Persona Template.
Key Elements of a Buyer Persona
- Age Range, Gender, Location: These three fields help us understand our customers’ demographics. Based on your experience, based on what you are talking to your customers, this information should be as accurate as possible.
- Problems They’re Facing: Whenever a customer wants to buy a product or service, they are facing a problem. They need something to fix that problem.
- What They’re Trying to Achieve: These are the goals of the customer. They know the problems, now what are they trying to achieve by fixing those problems?
- How They Shop: Your customers, how are they going to buy your product or hire your services? Whether they are doing their shopping online or in-store, from mobile or any other way.
- What Influences Their Purchase Decisions: These are the factors or the reasons which will affect their purchasing decision. For example, recommendations from other businesses, affordable pricing and flexible packages.
- Where They Learn About Products and Services: What platforms or sources do they use to learn about the products you are selling or the services you are selling? Online searches, social media platforms, local business networking events.
- Their Interests and Likes: What are your customers interested in and what they like? This helps you create targeted content and marketing messages.
- How Your Product/Service Solves Their Problem: We already covered what problems the customer is facing and what they’re trying to achieve. Now we need to identify how your product solves their problem.
- What Might Stop Them From Buying From You: We need to know what factors might prevent a customer from making a purchase. Limited budget, skepticism about digital marketing, lack of understanding about long-term benefits.
- One Main Message That Resonates With Them: This is like a tagline or the main line for your business. In one line, if you want to explain your business model to your customer, what is that?
This buyer persona worksheet is very important in your digital marketing for small business journey. When we are doing SEO, when we are doing social media marketing, when we are doing content marketing, any type of marketing channel, we are going to be referencing back to this persona worksheet.
Setting SMART Goals for Your Digital Marketing Campaign
In this chapter, we will learn the importance of setting SMART goals for your digital marketing campaign. The problem is I’m not talking about regular goals. I personally like to set smart business goals. This is very important.
It is an acronym, basically. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Learn more about setting effective goals with our SMART Goals Worksheet.
SMART Goals Breakdown
Specific
The goal should be very clear and specific. For example, instead of saying “I want to increase my web traffic,” you could have a goal to say something like, “I need to increase my web traffic by 20% within three months using Google search engine.” Now you understand the difference between both of these goals. One is just a basic goal, the other one is a targeted goal.
Measurable
Whatever goal you set, you should be able to track that goal’s progress. For example, for visitor goals, we can use Google Analytics to track the number of visitors. For social media marketing, we can use social media analytic tools to see the data on traffic and everything.
Achievable
This is very important. You should not set goals which are very, very hard to achieve, where you might never be able to achieve them in the time frame you set with the resources you have. At the same time, you should not set goals which are very easy, where without even putting any effort at all, you might achieve that goal.
So the goals you should set should require you to put in hard work, but they should still be achievable on your end as well. Achievable, but not easy goals.
Relevant
The goal you select should always align with your product or services which you’re selling. Whatever goals you set should always be relevant to your main business objective.
Time-bound
Set a deadline. It is always, always important. Create a plan, set up your schedule, create your deadline. We are living in a world with a lot of distractions. So we always need to make sure whatever goals we are setting, we are following them correctly. Set a deadline because this helps you with time management and also creates urgency and helps you to keep on track for this goal.
Digital Marketing Tools for Small Business
When implementing digital marketing strategies for small business, having the right tools is essential. Here are some digital marketing tools for small business that can help you succeed:
- Google Analytics – For tracking website performance and visitor behavior
- Google My Business – Essential for local SEO and local business visibility
- Social Media Management Tools – For scheduling and managing social media posts across platforms
- Email Marketing Platforms – For building and nurturing customer relationships
- SEO Tools – For keyword research and website optimization
These free digital marketing tools for small business can help you get started without breaking your budget, while paid tools can provide more advanced features as your business grows.
Digital Marketing Budget for Small Businesses
One of the most common questions is “how much should a small business spend on digital marketing?” The beauty of affordable digital marketing for small businesses is that you have complete control over your spending.
As I mentioned in the video, you can spend just $5 or $10, $500 or $5,000 – it’s all up to you. The results and effort will vary depending on your budget. The key is to start with what you’re comfortable with and scale up as you see results.
Budget Allocation Tips
- Website Development – 30-40% of initial budget
- SEO and Content Marketing – 25-35% of ongoing budget
- Social Media Marketing – 15-25% of ongoing budget
- Paid Advertising – 20-30% of ongoing budget (once foundation is set)
Creating Your Digital Marketing Action Plan
Now we are in the conclusion for the introduction series. From the next videos onwards, we are going to be focusing on each digital marketing strategy for small business. I’m going to teach you how you can create a website for small business. I’m going to teach you how you can do SEO for small business. I’m going to teach you how you can do social media marketing for small business and so on.
Here’s what I want to give you – a bit more information on helping you to come up with an action plan for your learning and doing digital marketing for small business.
Two Important Things to Note
1. Choose Your Digital Marketing Channels
I’m going to teach you all the digital marketing methods from now on. You don’t need to do everything because you only need to do whatever ones are working for you or wherever your customers are present. So choose whichever ones are suitable for you. Just don’t go and start doing everything immediately because you might get burned out.
2. Resource Management
This video series is primarily focused on small business owners. As a small business owner, we just don’t have an unlimited amount of money, time, resources, or even people. We don’t have that. We have limited capacity on everything.
So whatever digital marketing strategies we implement, whatever digital marketing plan we create, we want to make sure that it actually suits our resource allocation.
Create a Basic Plan
You don’t need to create some advanced digital marketing plan right now. We might do that at a later stage, but currently you should create a basic plan. Combine your buyer persona data, combine your SMART goals data, and choose the channels based on that.
For example, for most small businesses, what I would suggest is go with website, SEO, and social media marketing. Those should be the main important digital marketing channels. Then obviously you can go for others also.
I would create a small three-month plan for this:
- First Month: Create your business website. Create a business website which works really well for your business, informs everything about your business to your audience. Your audience can learn about your products or even purchase from the website itself.
- Second Month: Do SEO for your business website. You can try to do Google SEO, Bing SEO. You can also do local SEO for your business to rank on Google Maps, Google My Business listing, even Bing Places also.
- Third Month: Start doing social media marketing – Facebook profile setup and optimization, Twitter, LinkedIn, all these types of things.
- Fourth Month Onwards: You can make SEO and social media much stronger along with utilizing advanced strategies within that. From the fifth month or something like that, you can even bring in another digital marketing strategy.
Key Success Factors
The key important point is you have total control over it. You manage your time because you need to run your business at the same time and start implementing digital marketing, making sure both of them are working together really well.
Make a basic plan and start doing it because digital marketing is always evolving. We need to continuously learn and apply new strategies in our digital marketing.
Finally, before wrapping up, I just want to make sure that this is not just an overnight push-button solution for you. If you are going to be learning with me, you don’t need to worry about anything else because I’m going to teach you the right, exact, current, relevant strategies.
But if you are expecting to not put any work into it, just watching the video without doing it and trying to get success for your business – unfortunately, this is not going to work. I’m going to give you all the methods. I’m going to point you in the right direction, but you need to take that initiative and go out and start doing it for yourself.
Next Steps: Implementing Digital Marketing for Your Small Business
This is just the wrap-up for this digital marketing for small business fundamental series. I’m going to see you in the next video series.
If you are new to digital marketing and you don’t have any website or anything for your small business, then what I would suggest is to watch my next video series on how to create a website for small business, because that series is going to be the beginner fundamental digital marketing strategy.
Unless you already have a business website or you have already created a website or someone has created one for you, and you’re just looking to implement the next best digital marketing strategy, then what I would recommend is to either start with SEO or social media marketing. Both of these are really good. My personal favorite is SEO, but both are still really good.
For in-depth SEO strategies, check out our Semrush tutorial for beginners and business owners and our SEO beginners tutorial for business owners. Learn more about SEO keyword research for your business website.
Remember, you still need to keep learning. If you have any doubts, do let me know in the comments. I will personally help you out. I will personally advise you. We also have a community of over 8,000 members. Most of them are small business owners and professionals. Do ask your questions and doubts. It’s always good to have a community surrounding you so we can help each other out and build ourselves well.
For more digital marketing tips for small business and updates, join my insider newsletter.
Once again, thank you so much for watching this video series, and I’ll see you in the next video series for digital marketing for small business owners.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the primary benefit of digital marketing for small business?
The primary benefit is that it works as a 24/7 salesperson for your business, allowing customers to learn about and purchase from you at any time, while being cost-effective and measurable.
How much does digital marketing cost for a small business?
The cost can range from $5 to $5,000+ depending on your budget and strategies. The beauty of digital marketing for small businesses is that it’s scalable to fit any budget.
Why is digital marketing considered more suitable for small business than traditional marketing?
Digital marketing levels the playing field, allowing small businesses to compete with larger companies through creativity and targeted strategies, while being more cost-effective and measurable than traditional marketing methods.
Does digital marketing work for all businesses?
Yes, digital marketing can work for all businesses, but the strategies and channels used should be tailored to your specific target audience, industry, and business goals.